What the teacher said…
Mrs Boris likes to keep an eye on what we all eat, not too much chocolate, plenty of fruit, all that kind of stuff. All very sensible, but she comes up against a permanent battle from our younger child who considers it her mission in life to eat as much sweets and cake as possible.
Well, we have a new secret weapon that seems to work very well. Her new school teacher.
If we say that coke is not particularly good for her, it goes in one ear and out the other. But now her teacher has taken to instructing the class in what they should eat and drink, with terrible tales of what might happen if they ignore her. Stories of cancers and terrible illnesses abound at the dinner table at the moment.
If she doesn’t have a glass of milk, a piece of fruit, and a small amount of cereal, for breakfast she will probably not see the week out alive. The risks and consequences of drinking orange juice that has been sieved to remove the pulp, or made by adding water to concentrated orange juice, are similar to a lifetime of heroine abuse.
Where are the vegetables, where is the salad? These are the most common pleas at mealtimes in our house, and the children both try and creep out of the room under pretence of wanting an early night in bed, rather than be faced with the ordeal of having to eat a small slice of apple tart.
This is all very good of course. Luckily at school they both get a four course lunch, and it is more or less obligatory to eat everything provided (more so at primary school than secondary school). This rule is enforced despite one of them being almost physically sick when she has to eat omelette. Those are the school rules and they will be followed.
Well in fact the rule is that the children must at least try everything, and can leave it if they then don’t like it. But the dinner-ladies don’t stand for such nonsense, and give out terrible punishments if so much as a scrap of pork fat remainds on their plates. I exaggerate, but less than you think.
I should add that the school lunches here more or less never include chips, burgers or other junk food, and the pudding is often a piece of fruit or a yoghurt. Starter is usually some form of salad - tomato and beetroot are ever popular. I don’t mean tomato with lettuce or beetroot with lettuce I do mean a plate of tomato or a plate of beetroot.
One irritating consequence of all this fine eating is that our older child now has a great knack for making a salad herself. I will look in the fridge and announce that there is nothing to eat. She will then amble over, and with dazzling speed create the finest salad you have ever seen from a few green leaves, a tomato, bits of crushed walnut, a sprinkling of roquefort crumbs, and an unidentified mixture of other ingredients. Balsamic vinegar seems to occur quite often in the ingredients.
So she is usually sat at the table with a salad the Roux brothers would be pleased to serve in a top restaurant, while I am faced with a plate of something that looks like yesterdays leftovers.
